Meeting for friendship among peoples

The Meeting for friendship among peoples (Meeting per l'amicizia fra i popoli in Italian) is a multi-event Catholic festival held every year in Rimini, Italy in a week at the end of August. The first edition took place in 1980.

The meeting is organized by Communion and Liberation, a lay, Catholic movement.

Apart from seven people who work full-time for its planning, the festival is entirely staged, managed and dismantled by about 4000 volunteers (mostly university students) coming from all over Italy and ten other countries of the world. The meeting has had about 800,000 attendees per year in the last editions. Several prominent people from science, culture, society and politics give lectures at the meeting, including Nobel prize recipients, religious authorities (the Pope participated in 1982), politicians and ministers (the Italian prime minister participated a few times), international authorities (Tony Blair and others), writers, musicians (Riccardo Muti participated).

After the meeting in Rimini, other similar events have been organized: among these, the New York Encounter, an event held in New York in January every year and the Cairo Meeting, held in Cairo (Egypt).

Every year the meeting has an overriding theme, to which every event is intended to relate

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